South Sudan And Kenya Sign MOU To Fight Smuggling At The Borders

The South Sudan Customs Services has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Kenya Revenue Authority to help reduce cross border smuggling.

17 January 2013

Customs Officials from South Sudan pose for a photo with the Kenya Revenue Authority representatives in Juba. [Juma John Stephen]

By Juma John Stephen

JUBA, 17 January 2013 [Gurtong] – “We have signed a Memorandum of Understanding and we are going to cooperate in Customs issues and fight customs offences especially smuggling,” Maj. Gen. Fredrick Lokule said.

“This memorandum of Understanding address under evaluation of goods. The right people trusted to South Sudan get bond papers but somewhere between Malaba and Nimule they change bond papers to forged onces with the aim of getting less taxes at the border,” he said.

Lokule said that the customs authorities will soon put a mechanism that will end the forgery of the bonds papers.

“The aim is to maximize revenue; we do not want to compromise revenue and crackdown fake goods. We are also looking at capacity building in this MOU,” he said.

The South Sudan Customs Services last October suspended duty free status of good on transit with exception of the United Nation Agencies goods in order to boost its economy.

Meanwhile the Commissioner General of Kenya Revenue Authority, John Njiraini said the growing economic development in revenue collection should be strengthened.

“The Memorandum of Understanding we signed is going to help us a lot in both sides in terms of dealing with mutual problem of customs fraud and in enhancing of customs revenue in customs,” Njiraini said.

“In Kenya, we have been having challenges; the dumping of goods meant for transit and goods for export from Kenya to South Sudan. We believe that the mechanism we have set up will now help us to address the problem of diversion of goods so that both countries can benefit from the increase of the trade,” he said.

The Kenyan Ambassador to South Sudan, Cleveland Leshore said the MOU will formalize the customs framework to work between the two neighboring nations.